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by David E. Schultz

  lion’s share of his output, is an initially overwhelming stylistic virtuosity, “a sort of verbal black magic,” as one of his letters describes it ( SL 126). His painstaking attention to phonetic pattern, often fashioned to the point of ostentation, is combined with an abundance of visual detail and figurative language. It is a very

  rhythmical and ornate style, comparable to Poe, yet embodying also the influence of Lafcadio Hearn, whose colorful early writings included landmark translations of Gustave Flaubert and Théophile Gautier. The following exemplary passage is from the original version of “The Double Shadow”:

  Stern and white as a tomb, older than the memory of the dead, and built by

  men or devils beyond the recording of myth, is the mansion wherein we dwell. Far below, on black, naked reefs, the northern sea climbs and roars indomitably, or ebbs with a ceaseless murmur as of armies of baffled demons; and the house is

  filled evermore, like a hollow-sounding sepulcher, with the drear echo of its tu-multuous voices; and the winds wail in dismal wrath around the high towers, but shake them not. ( DS 18)

  Smith’s rich vocabulary, regarded as “too flowery” by those who, perhaps, are re-

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  acting against his innate romanticism, was garnered through a deliberate study of the dictionary, with emphasis on Latin and French origins, and nouns pertaining to natural forms. By and large, the wide vocabulary is used very expressively and is a fundamental asset to the prose style. Coinages include prefix and suffix variations as practiced by Poe, and forced plurals like “lamiae” and others. The range of vocabulary is even more amazing when one considers that his publishing prospects were limited to pulp magazines like Weird Tales and Wonder Stories. While most of his fiction was written in a prolific eight-year span, from “The Last Incantation” in 1929 to “The Garden of Adompha” in 1937, he generally abhorred the commercial attitude toward writing. Words such as “plenilune” and “fulgor” (in “An Offering to the Moon”) are resonant facets of a careful method of revision, adding to the sense of remoteness from the mainstream, or of a disruption in the continuous fabric of space and time.

  For example, “sea-lost littorals of Mu” ( OST 103) is a lyrical phrase associating a legendary lost continent with the ocean depths surrounding Mark Irwin, stranded narrator of “The Uncharted Isle.” This tale was cited by the author as a personal favorite. Its central situation is drawn from Poe’s “Ms. Found in a Bottle.” Placed by the vicissitude of sea-faring fate on an island which should not exist, Irwin is unable to make his presence known to the strange, ancient persons who are its forlorn inhabitants:

  None of them appeared to notice me; and I went up to a group of three who were

  studying one of the long scrolls I have mentioned, and addressed them. For all answer, they bent closer above the scroll; and even when I plucked one of them by the sleeve, it was evident that he did not observe me. Much amazed, I peered into their faces, and was struck by the mingling of supreme perplexity and monoma-niacal intentness which their expression displayed. ( OST 106)

  The outcasts are forever bewildered by the vanishment of the sunken conti-

  nent of Mu, according to Irwin’s description of their maps. He wanders the island, noting the same expression on every face. Entering their temple one evening, he watches as they prepare to sacrifice a boy, the only child among them, to a monstrous half-human idol. A cloud of horror paralyzes Irwin’s memory, and he awakens at sea, to be rescued after several days of rowing. The story reflects Smith’s perception of life as paradox, for he stated that “it can be read as an allegory of human disorientation” ( PD 73).

  Irwin’s wandering of the island discloses the crux of the predicament, a ge-

  neric plot-device. Based on a nightmare of Smith’s youth, “The Primal City” de-

  scribes an untrodden mountain region where architectural remnants of unearthly

  origin attract a party of explorers. The mammoth-sized ruins are guarded by vast, sentient, and forbidding clouds, which rout the trespassers, “their voices calling like clarions in the sky, with ominous, world-shaking syllables that the ear can never seize” ( GL 109). The title character of “Xeethra” is a young goatherd who strays into an ominous cavern, then descends to the mythical Underworld of

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  Thasaidon (improvisations of Hades and Satan).

  Smith’s own “perambulations” in the Sierra foothills near his parents’ cabin,

  where he would remain alone for many years after their deaths until his marriage to Carol Dorman, are alluded to in his letters, and in the amusingly autobiographical story “The Light from Beyond”: “My name is Dorian Weirmoth. My series of illustrative paintings, based on the poems of Poe, will perhaps be familiar to some of my readers” ( LW 366–67). Weirmoth has withdrawn to the seclusion of his cabin in the Sierras, to gain artistic inspiration from the same mountain vistas that Smith knew so intimately. Like his brilliantly imaginative fantasy, “The City of the Singing Flame,” this story of beings from another dimension impinging upon our world

  was successful with readers because of Smith’s clinical skill in the involvement of all the senses (not just the visionary sensations) through the evocative descriptions of his artistic narrator:

  the wheel of rays began once more to revolve slowly. It swiftened, and presently I could no longer distinguish the separate beams. All I could see was a whirling disk, like a moon that spun dizzily but maintained the same position relative to the

  rocks and junipers. Then, without apparent recession, it grew dim and faded on

  the sapphire darkness. I heard no longer the remote and flute-like murmur; and

  the perfume ebbed from the valley like an outgoing tide, leaving but elusive

  wraiths of unknown spicery. ( LW 369)

  A similar setting near the Smith cabin was described in a letter to H. P. Love-

  craft, almost three years earlier. In August 1930, Smith said that he had composed

  “The Red World of Polaris” “beneath the thousand-year-old junipers on granite

  crags; and the giant firs and hemlocks by the margin of sapphire tarns” (Behrends,

  “Chronology” 18). Its main idea, of an alien race “who had their brains implanted into indestructible metal bodies, and who are going to perform the same office for the humans who visit their world” (Behrends, “Hieroglyphs” 9), is roughly similar to Lovecraft’s “The Whisperer in Darkness,” begun in February of that same year, but not finalized until 26 September, just over a month after the date of Smith’s letter ( Dagon 447). This is doubly ironic because Lovecraft’s letter to Smith of 21 January 1927 had told him that the similarity between Donald Wandrei’s prose-poem “The

  Messengers” and Smith’s poem “The Envoys” demonstrated “the essential parallel-

  lism of the fantastic imagination in different individuals—a circumstance strongly arguing the existence of a natural & definite (though rare) mental world of the weird”

  ( Selected Letters 2.98–99).

  In his essay, “The Song of the Necromancer: ‘Loss’ in Clark Ashton Smith’s

  Fiction,” Steve Behrends distinguishes two sources of poetic melancholy: the loss of love and the loss of the past. In their development of mood, Smith’s tales were habitually an outgrowth of these themes. Among the many contributors to the fantasy Mecca that was Weird Tales in the 1930s, only he and Robert E. Howard developed, in convincing detail, several imaginary-world scenarios for their works. Settings such

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  as prehistoric Hyperborea, Poseidonis (Atlantis), or the medieval French province of Averoigne helped Smith capture that sense of “lostness,” which for him was,

  personally and artistically, of paramount significance. No less lost or time-eaten is the far-future continent of Zothique, the setting of sixteen t
ales and a one-act play, The Dead Will Cuckold You. This poetic melancholy, as metaphor, lends its luster to stories that are otherwise exercises in pure macabre, like “The Garden of Adompha,” in which human body parts sprout from plants that have been nourished by

  the corpses of murdered concubines. Sages, sorcerers, and kings, though they summon “spirits from the vasty deep,” are themselves subject to regret and ennui. This is why we find only a slight treatment of the contemporary life of people in Smith’s fictional worlds; they are overshadowed by the subject at hand, be it the death of a beautiful woman or the imaginatively dramatized struggle to overcome personal unhappiness. His opinion of literary realism is clear-cut:

  My distaste for the literature of quotidian detail is doubtless the result of a sort of personal disenchantment with the social world . . . With me, though, there is no conscious desire to go back in time—only a wild aspiration toward the unknown,

  the uncharted, the exotic, the utterly strange and extra-terrestrial. ( SL 126) Leaving few stones unturned, Smith revelled in tales of revenge, eldritch horror, supernal happenings, and time-space voyages. “The Dark Eidolon,” “The

  Vaults of Yoh-Vombis,” “Xeethra,” “The Double Shadow,” and “The Chain of

  Aforgomon” belong on the short list of permanent classics in the genre. Although he dealt with all manner of fantasies, he is often thought of as being preoccupied with morbid themes. However, some of his more gruesome works use psychological detail sparingly but tellingly, as they reach pinnacles of descriptive ghastliness; the finality of death is more of an afterthought than a focal point. Marvin R. Hiemstra called this “an intense concern with the precise psychological state” ( EOD

  265), and it evinces a masterful exposition of the macabre.

  Superficially, Smith shares Poe’s interest in the disintegration of personality, but his sardonic sense of humor is frequently the Venus flytrap to our instinctive sympathy for the characters. “The Empire of the Necromancers” combines mordant humor with pull-out-the-stops supernaturalism. Two outcast wizards, Mmat-

  muor and Sodosma, create a desert-kingdom for themselves, by resurrecting the

  skeletal remains of a people whose land had been visited by the plague in a bygone age. A triumph of style over substance, Smith’s cadent phrasing turns a facile juxtaposition of the dead and living into a bizarre portrait of greed:

  Tribute was borne to them by fleshless porters from outlying realms; and

  plague-eaten corpses, and tall mummies scented with mortuary balsams, went to

  and fro upon their errands in Yethlyreom, or heaped before their greedy eyes,

  from inexhaustible vaults, the cobweb-blackened gold and dusty gems of antique

  time. ( LW 163)

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  Such danse-macabre atmosphere evokes a peculiar mood. It could even be in-

  terpreted as a muted satire on the poetry of T. S. Eliot (1885–1965), where “the present fades into the past and the past into the present” (Altick 1586). Raised from the dead by the necromancers, the former emperor Ileiro makes observations that merge with Smith’s putative reaction to the disdaining of Romantic “excess”

  by Imagist poets:

  He saw their caprices of cruelty and lust, their growing drunkenness and gluttony.

  He watched them wallow in their necromantic luxury, and become lax with indo-

  lence, gross with indulgence. They neglected the study of their art, they forgot many of their spells. ( LW 165)

  Ileiro had been a boy-king, so his indignation at being torn with unutterable violence from the sleep of death is horrifying and amusing at the same time. Mmatmuor and Sodosma are fittingly beheaded in their sleep, their blood “adding a deeper red to the rose and a brighter hue to the sad purple of their couches” ( LW 168).

  “A Night in Malnéant” is nearer in spirit to Poe than anything else from

  Smith’s pen, excepting his prose poems. He referred to it as “one of my best atmospherics” (Behrends, “Chronology” 17), and indeed it is a small masterpiece of sustained centrality of effect. It begins as follows:

  My sojourn in the city of Malnéant occurred during a period of my life no less

  dim and dubious than that city itself and the misty regions lying thereabout. I have no precise recollection of its locality, nor can I remember exactly when and how I came to visit it. But I had heard vaguely that such a place was situated along my route; and when I came to the fog-enfolded river that flows beside its walls, and heard beyond the river the mortuary tolling of many bells, I surmised that I was approaching Malnéant. ( OST 43)

  The narrator has been wandering, not out of curiosity, but to assuage a deep

  remorse and sense of guilt regarding the death of the lady Mariel from “the ano-dyne of a lethal poison” ( OST 43). The allusive tone recalls Poe’s last poem, “Annabel Lee”: “For she had loved me with an affection deeper and purer and more

  stable than mine; and my changeable temper, my fits of cruel indifference or ferocious irritability, had broken her gentle heart” ( OST 43).

  The bereaved man asks direction from two scurrying women, who cryptically

  reply that they cannot tell, because they are shroud-weavers and have been fashion-ing a shroud for Mariel. It appears that the entire community is involved in the preparations for her funeral, to the exclusion of all other activities. And so at last he ventures into the cathedral, where he is directed to walk down the aisle to behold her corpse:

  The tides of time were frozen in their flowing; and all that was or had been or could be, all of the world that existed apart from her, became as fading shadows;

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  and even as once before (was it eons or instants ago?) my soul was locked in the marble hell of its supreme grief and regret. ( OST 49)

  In the same fashion as “The Uncharted Isle,” the narrator’s circular move-

  ments, and the surface imagery of the seemingly illogical behavior he observes, create a dreamlike mutability of incident. The sentence just quoted, though it only confirms what we have come to expect, is strangely riveting and clinches the story.

  “The Second Interment” is based on Poe’s “The Premature Burial,” and its

  protagonist is “Sir Uther Magbane.” Impelled by a premonition that he will be buried alive, he installs a push-button alarm in his casket. Mentally confined by his obsessive fear and psychosomatic illness, he fails to realize that the real threat is posed by his avaricious brother. Like Roderick Usher, he is inevitably “a victim to the terrors he had anticipated.” Nightmarish images, preceded by a dreamscape

  vision of his former fiancée, race through his mind as he suffocates: “He was

  climbing eternal stairs, bearing in his arms the burden of some gigantic corpse, only to have the stairs crumble beneath him at each step, and to fall back with the corpse lying upon him and swelling to macrocosmic proportions” ( OST 127–28). This ending, with its implicit criticism of a self-deluded response to feminine beauty, is similar in tone to Smith’s poem “The Nightmare Tarn.”

  “Sadastor” wakes the echoes of Poe’s “Silence—A Fable.” Both are tales first

  told by a demon, then anonymously related to us. Each begins with the verb “listen,” and each presents stark, otherworldly scenery surrounding a mysterious figure wrapped in gloom and sorrow. The conversation of the demon Charnadis with the

  siren Lyspial elicits a sense of pathos. Lyspial is the last member of her race, abiding by the dwindling waters of a briny pool that once was a vast ocean. Her speech is rendered as a kind of lilting lament, contrasting “the barrenness of the present”

  (Altick 1585) with the glories of the past.

  “The Isle of the Torturers” recapitulates the opening story-line of “The

  Masque of the Red Death.” The newly ascended king Fulbra of Yoros sets sail in a vain attempt to “seek she
lter in the southern isle of Cyntrom” ( LW 174) from the swift advent of the “Silver Death.” Drifting off course, his barge is approached by another vessel, and a tempest ensues, driving both ships to shore on the sinister isle of Uccastrog. The forms of torture perpetrated on the abducted king and his retinue are ended only when Fulbra, in despair, removes a red metal ring, given to him as a magical protection from the lethal plague. This dooms them all, for the contagion is immediately released: “And oblivion claimed the Isle of Uccastrog; and the torturers were one with the tortured” ( LW 189).

  Agitating features like torture, suicide, murder, or eroticism are never at center stage, nor are they simply sidelights. They are blended in “to achieve a more varied sensation of weirdness” ( SL 219). Smith objected to Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright’s suggestion that that he was catering to prurient interest. Rather, as with the art lover of “The Willow Landscape,” who, forced to part with his treasures, is magically transported into a delicate landscape painting of a bamboo bridge with

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  an Oriental maiden walking on it, Smith was “fond of plunging his readers into an unreal world which is not necessarily opposed to the reassuring world of everyday reality” (Marigny 7).

  Then again, some stories do hinge upon the rejection of mundane aspects of

  daily life. A young protagonist in “The Witchcraft of Ulua” is cautioned about “the true nature of carnal desire” ( AY 30), while “The Holiness of Azédarac,” on the other hand, finds the monk Ambrose traveling back in time by the agency of green and red philters, to exchange his chaste existence for sexual fulfillment. And in

  “Morthylla,” the poet Valzain is dispirited by the hollowness of pleasure and inves-tigates the rumor of a beautiful lamia, said to haunt the local necropolis. But when he finds that the mesmerizing Morthylla is really only a similarly disillusioned woman named Beldith, Valzain kills himself in despair. His shade then returns to reenact their meeting, as the narrative circles back on itself to repeat the description of his first approach of the abandoned cemetery. Like Ambrose, Valzain